Marty McFly's Ambient Obscurance (MXAO) with IL

Nerrel wrote: Yep, it's working now. It seems the sample radius setting is very different from 2.0; in order to match the visuals with a radius of around 3 in the old version I had to set to 9 in this version. It definitely seems sharper and more detailed now, like on the pegs on the rack on the left (2.0 on left, 3.1 on right).

Are smoothed normals enabled in both cases?

They are. I couldn't get the option to appear in the UI with the new version, but I could tell it was active after adding the code to the preprocessor section. All of the settings in those shots were as similar as I could get them. I tried the TSS option but it really doesn't seem to work with a 20fps game- way too much ghosting.

How useful is the TSS option? Personally, I only see ghosting if I'm really looking for it, but everyone who tried it reported severe ghosting. Keep it or rip it out? I'd like my AO to be free of any unnecessary features.

I use it. Sure, there is ghosting, but at higher framerates, it's harder to notice. I prefer it to having a weird pattern all over the screen with reduced framerate.

At 30 FPS and below though, it often becomes too noticeable, but one can make the argument that you shouldn't be adding effects to an otherwise heavy load, unless you just want screenshots, and at that point, TSS is not for you.

That's funny because I had the opposite experience. It was more noticeable on Divinity Original Sin 2 running at 100fps than it was on Psychonauts running at 60fps. Maybe it was because Divinity has so much more geometry on the screen? I didn't notice it at all in Psychonauts. They're also very different games so it's not a fair comparison.

Same experience with Dying Light and Witcher 3 no matter how high the framerate.

The lower the AO/IL intensity, the less obvious the ghosting

I do like how the temporal setting and ghosting looks in some games while in some others it looks bad. Performance vise I wouldn't need it but I vote for keepiong it based on the looks. Seems like the higher detailed the game is, the better it works and vise versa.

I think the way you currently have it is fine. Disabled by default but there if someone wants to manually enable it. Kind of how IL is disabled by default. That way if a particular game has no issues with it, like Psychonauts for me, then you get the added benefit.

Alright, will keep it then. That's what MXAO is about, drop-in SSAO solution that has a multitude of additional features, if wanted

First of all, I like to say that mxao is amazing, its adds so much depth to my game, its far superior than the ingame ssao for total war warhammer 2.
I have never seen a total war game looking that good. But there is a serious disadvantage with the overlay, it also affects the ui which makes it appear transparent. I tried using ui mask, but that doesnt work as the ui constantly changes. I was wondering if its possible to make mxao to ignore the ui entirely, maybe by creating a custom dll for the game or something like that similar to what enbs do.

steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/86849...2D203D7EA8AF7126BD4/

steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/86849...03B253B69020252C102/

hjunge wrote: First of all, I like to say that mxao is amazing, its adds so much depth to my game, its far superior than the ingame ssao for total war warhammer 2.
I have never seen a total war game looking that good. But there is a serious disadvantage with the overlay, it also affects the ui which makes it appear transparent. I tried using ui mask, but that doesnt work as the ui constantly changes. I was wondering if its possible to make mxao to ignore the ui entirely, maybe by creating a custom dll for the game or something like that similar to what enbs do.

steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/86849...2D203D7EA8AF7126BD4/

steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/86849...03B253B69020252C102/

Unfortunately for game as TW Warhammer 2, there is no good way to mask away the ui.

I have never seen to have custom Reshade specially made for a game to change when it renders. Don't think it will happen either. As long not someone puts a lot time to do just that.

My experience with the new version 3.1.

I really like the new streamlined image quality settings. Faster to setup and try around settings.

I think the TSS option is a winner. I tried out diffrent situations, 30fps, 60fps and just plain unlocked fps. I see a benefit with higher framerate but it useful to in 30fps too in a pinch. Most of the time the ghosting artifact is not distracting and you probably wont notice it if you dont look for it. I think depends how strong you make your effect. I prefer a more subtle approach as often already in areas where shadows are. In some situations it actually look better. I upgraded my GPU from 960 to 970. But still will struggle to get to 60fps in newer games but this make it easier. I suspect my favorite genres play role that dont think TSS ghosting is problem, as I mostly play stealth with a controller. Maybe twitch shooters it can be distracting.

I dont really know what you done, maybe it is the more streamlined quality effect settings that use better settings that I dialed in myself. But I think it looks smoother and less intrusive when renders over the game. I think I may have made the blur sharpness to sharp in earlier MXAO versions.

I played around with this for a couple days. Maybe logged 20 hours with MXAO31, no weird shit happened. Could be worth mentioning, though I never had any weird shit happen with any ReShade shader than minor bugs.

What find most pleasing is that I dont know any AO solution that can match this one versatility and quality. It is kinda weird though. That bigger guys have not done much to advance AO.

That sound promising

About other SSAO implementations, trust me, there have been advancements. Given more resources, I know a lot of things to advance MXAO alone.

Intel ASSAO for example, can use as few as 3 samples to look moderate, they use a sophisticated algorithm to create an importance map where AO is most likely to be and increase sample quality there.

The seemingly hated HBAO+ is not so much different from MXAO: both use the Alchemy AO estimator. Then there's deinterleaved texturing - AO samples are randomized which is bad to predict for a video card so you just collect all pixels with same sampling dirs and process them together. I did that earlier but on ReShade it's too slow. MXAO switches to smaller versions of the depth buffer for far away samples, like alchemy AO and ASSAO. These use a different mipmap (those smaller depth buffer versions) generation algorithm that gives you better quality for free.

AO in games has no big role in visuals nowadays, better use a PBR pipeline and a good VFX artist, done. It used to be great in times when you only had flat shading with no fancy stuff, shadow or no shadow. You can bake raytraced AO in textures for a better visual than ever. Voxel AO is becoming popular as video cards are getting faster, it's visual difference is thousandfold.

Only on ReShade, where the scene rendering can't be changed, AO makes a big difference. ENB's SSAO in Skyrim or Fallout is much superior to MXAO, not only because it can use deferred normals so AO responds to surface bumpyness that normal maps create. I tried to fake that in earlier version but it didn't work out.

Little do I know.

I used HBAO in many games with help Ambient Occlusion compatibility flags and NVIDIA profile inspector. I think it is adequate solution. But most games I can't get it to work. Think what HBAO had against it was under the whole NVIDIA gameworks which is not that popular. I preferred over some SSAO solutions delivered in the games. The custom editing of driver profiles is a hit and miss. Sometimes I don't know why it just took a crazy amount of performance to be affordable to use. I think MXAO is way ahead in how it looks. But it worked in some game where MXAO did not work. But it can be a pain to setup when looks weird which requires hex editing to change some of it settings how it renders. I just do not have the patience to do most of time.

Only game I have with this voxel AO is Tomb Raider ROTR. Have not had time to even play it yet Now I am curious just to see how that looks.

Yeah I agree, the improvement AO can bring to games that just have shadows is spectacular. I have not tried out the ENB things in Skyrim and Fallout. Which I want to do now. I thought it was more or less the same things that Reshade could do. Guess I was making assumptions

Gonetz of the GlideN64 plugin was kind enough to look into making the depth buffer available in newer versions, but he ran into an issue that requires clarification:

I installed latest Reshade and tested it with Project64 2.3
To my surprise, depth based filters do work. ...

No problems, as well as with other depth buffer based shaders.

With current master it looks upside-down ...
I tried to invert it, but without success.

The main question: why it ever works? I do not copy depth from FBO to main depth buffer. Release does not do it. Master does not do it too. My only guess was that Reshade takes data not from color and depth buffer but from FBO, because image in FBO is upside down. However, when I apply filters for color buffer such as 'cartoon', it applied correctly, not upside down. So, where Reshade takes depth buffer data?

Marty, would you be able to answer this in terms of what your plugin needs in order to work, or is this something that is more specific to reshade itself? I can relay it to Gonetz or you could check his post directly on github: github.com/gonetz/GLideN64/issues/1548

I think you're mistaken here: ReShade is not my plug in, crosire is the author of it. I'm just a shader programmer for ReShade (ReShade alone doesn't have any shaders, it's a means to load shaders into a game).

Yeah, that's what I was thinking. I wasn't sure how much your plugin depended on ReShade to gain access to the game's information. I'll ask about it elsewhere, thanks.

MXAO 3.1:

New SSAO:

Whoa! What's this?